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In Berkshires Dance Oasis, Fresh Talents Still Bloom

Ted Shawn, far left, founder of the Jacobs Pillow festival, with his Men Dancers in 1936. Credit
Richard Merrill

It was a dark and stormy night at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Thunder and lightning crashed around the slender figure of a choreographer, Joanna Haigood, who had crossed the deserted festival campus to make a call at a pay phone. She was frightened, but then a strange calm settled over her. She felt protected, for some reason. She later discovered that she, a black woman, was standing near a stop on the Underground Railroad where slaves had been hidden on their way north to freedom.

Out of that experience in the mid-1990s came the dance “Invisible Wings,” which chronicled the Underground Railroad and was performed in 1998 at this summer festival in Becket, Mass., in the Berkshires. A signature piece for both the Pillow and Ms. Haigood, this site-specific dance is one of many works created during residencies at the Pillow, open year-round. This week audiences will see another piece created there, Kate Weare’s “Bridge of Sighs,” which opens on Thursday and continues through Sunday at the Doris Duke Studio Theater, in a program with Maureen Fleming.

Ms. Weare, a 36-year-old modern-dance choreographer whose training, in California and England, included a lot of martial arts, has become known for knotty little duets in which men and women poke, punch and slap each other, adding percussive texture to dance with an erotic edge.

“My work tends to be really direct and emotive and earnest,” she said. And yes, she added, just a little bit wry.

“Bridge of Sighs,” set to original music by the band One Ring Zero, is a quartet piece drawn from an odd collection of images that include historical bridges in Chicago and Venice. The one in Chicago led workers into a slaughterhouse, and the Venice bridge was where convicts on their way to prison could pause for a last wave to their families. Another inspiration was a new relationship Ms. Weare had tumbled into with a wholeheartedness that at first alarmed her, after “many, many love affairs.”

Participation in the Pillow’s Creative Development Residency Program is by invitation, extended by the festival’s executive director, Ella Baff. Ms. Baff had seen Ms. Weare’s work in rehearsal at the Joyce SoHo in New York and was intrigued. Ms. Weare joins a long list of formal and ad hoc artistic “residents,” going back to the founding of the Pillow by Ted Shawn, the modern-dance pioneer, in 1933.

The first resident was Shawn himself, who rehearsed works for his touring Men Dancers troupe and then opened up the rehearsals to the locals, who were served tea and charged “grocery money” for admission, as the Pillow’s director of preservation, Norton Owen, put it. The list of former residents includes Antony Tudor (“Pillar of Fire”), Agnes de Mille (“Rodeo”), Bill T. Jones (“The Last Supper”), Judith Jamison and Stephen Petronio, who, Ms. Baff says, described the experience as comparable to “being marooned in heaven.”

There is nothing to do but work during the residencies, which tend to take place from September through November and from March through May. Two to six slots are available each year.

“They have full run of the place,” Ms. Baff said of the participants. The dancers may rehearse in the studios and Duke theater, live in the 18th-century Derby House, do research in the Pillow’s rich archives and even, if adept, use its video-editing equipment.

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“This is a reflection of other things we do at the Pillow,” Ms. Baff said. “It depends on where artists are at the moment. Some have no studios, so it’s hard to get the dancers together and have a concerted and focused period even to make work. What goes into the making of a dance is hidden to most of the public. It’s so daunting.”

Small stipends are available, as is advice from year-round staff members on matters like marketing and production — or not. “They left us totally alone,” Ms. Weare said. “It was wonderful.”

Derby House, named after Ruth Derby, who ran an early boarding house on what is now Pillow property, is said to be inhabited by ghosts, though no one has reported encountering Ms. Derby herself. A photo of “Mother Derby” in the archives shows her standing in the doorway with a big smile and a shotgun in her hand.

Ms. Weare and her dancers, who worked at the Pillow in the winter and spring, had less ghostly adventures. Winter rehearsals are usually held in the Duke theater, or “barn,” as the artists call it, because it is heated. But the warmth also brought frozen wasps, in residence themselves, to slumbering life, slowly falling to the floor as Ms. Weare’s dancers rehearsed.

Soon after this festival’s last performances, on Aug. 24, choreographers and performers, students and teachers will head out from that lush green home for dance. A relative quiet will settle over the grounds, but then, with the first falling leaves or snowflakes, there will be signs of activity again in the funky old studios and performing space. Another new piece will be taking shape at the Pillow for another season.

Works by Kate Weare and Maureen Fleming will be performed Thursday through Sunday at Jacob’s Pillow, 358 George Carter Road, Becket, Mass.; (413) 243-0745, jacobspillow.org.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E3 of the New York edition with the headline: In Berkshires Dance Oasis, Fresh Talents Still Bloom. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe